To the north of William Fitz Osbern, Roger de Montgomery, the other friend of William’s early days, was established in an earldom threaded by the Severn as Herefordshire is threaded by the Wye, and stretching along the former river to the town and castle to which the house of Montgomery left its name. From the standpoint of frontier strategy Roger’s position was even more important than that held by his neighbour of Hereford; for Shrewsbury, the point where roads from London, Stafford and the east, and Chester and the north met before crossing the Severn, continued throughout the Middle Ages to be the key to mid-Wales. Unfortunately, the date at which Roger received the Shropshire earldom cannot be fixed with certainty, for, while he appears at court in the enjoyment of comital rank as early as 1069, the one account which we possess of the operations at Shrewsbury in the latter year virtually implies that the town was then in the king’s hand. Probably the discrepancy is to be explained by the fact that before he received his grant of Shropshire Roger had been given the castle of Arundel and the town of Chichester in the distant shire of Sussex.[309] It is highly probable, in fact, that Roger possessed the rights of an earl over the latter county,[310] and such a grant would fall in well with the general policy of the Conqueror, for Sussex was only less important than Kent as a point of arrival from the continent, and in the eleventh century Arundel was a port. Most probably Roger was appointed earl of Shrewsbury after the events of 1069 had shown that a coalition of Welsh and English was the most pressing danger of the moment, but he continued in possession of Arundel and Chichester.[311] Once established at Shrewsbury, Roger and his followers speedily proceeded to take the offensive against the Welsh, and in 1072 Hugh de Montgomery, the earl’s eldest son, extended his raids as far south as Cardigan. In addition to being the earl of two English shires, Roger de Montgomery held great possessions in Normandy and France; in right of his wife he was count of Bellême, and by a more distant succession he became Seigneur of Alençon, while a series of marriage alliances placed him at the head of a powerful group of kinsmen. But it is probable that the place which he holds in history is due less to his wide lands and great power than to the accident that one of his knights became the father of the greatest historian whom Normandy had so far produced. The earl of Shrewsbury was a great baron and a loyal knight, but when we regard him as representing the best aspect of the Norman conquerors of England we are, consciously or otherwise, guided by the place which he fills in the narrative of the chronicler born within his earldom, Ordericus Vitalis.